1918
1917 1918 1919 The last year of an absurd and unnecessary world war that cost the lives of tens of millions and destroyed four great empires closes with massive human suffering and political disorder. At Versailles U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson and his British and French counterparts negotiate a bad peace agreement that guarantees the rest of the century will suffer continuous nationalist and ideological motivated violence. Events * 20% of French casualties occur during this last year of the First World War. * District of Columbia adopts a minimum wage law. * Alexander Bogdanov's Red Star is republished in Petrograd and Moscow. * Huey P. Long is elected to the Louisiana Railroad Commission at age 25 on an anti-Standard Oil platform. * Gulgencio Batista is hired to work as a brakeman on the United Fruit Company's railroad. * Mexican anarchist leader Flores Magon receives a 20-year sentence for "obstructing the war effort", a violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. He will die in Leavenworth at Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1922. * V. Volodarsky dies. * U.S. Marines continue the nineteen year long occupation of Haiti, from 1915-1934. Timeline March * March 3: Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is signed. * March 25: Swiss-American conductir of the Boston Symphony Orchestra Karl Muck is arrested for suspected pro-German sympathies. He is interned for the duration of WWI on Ellis Island. April * April: Patriotic militarist mobs humilate German-Americans, including clergy, in San Jose, California, Detriot, Michigan, Columbus and Huron, Ohio and in Papilion, Nebraska. * April 4: Patriotic militarist mob in Collinsville, Illinois lynches German-American Robert Prager. may * May 9: V.I. Lenin announces that "those who have grain and fail to deliver it to properly designated rail stations...are enemies of the people." Aleksandr Tsiurupa is made Commissar of the Dictatorship of Food Supply with the approval of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. June * June 6: On orders from the Left Social-Revolutionary Party, 19 year old Yakov Grigorievich Blumkin shoots Count Mirbacj, the German ambassador to Moscow. This was the same day that the Left-Revolutionary Pary's insurrection against the Bolsheviks began. * June 11: V.I. Lenin decrees the creation of Committee of Poor Peasants to expropriate the slightly wealthier peasant called kulaks and to attack landlordism ideologically. * June 16: Socialist Party leader Eugene V. Debs gives speech in Canton, Illinois for which is later prosecuted under the Sedition Act and sentenced to 10 years imprisonment. July * July 4: Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets meets in the Bolshoi Theatre. * July 8: Red Cross ambulance driver Ernest Hemingway is wounded on the Italian-Austrian front, goes on to drag a wounded Italian soldier to safety under machine gun fire. * July 18: Allies attack Soissons and Chateau-Thierry, with more pointless loss of life. * July 18: Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela is born small village of Qunu, Mthatha district. August * August: U.S. and Mexican troops do battle in Nogales, Mexico. * August 30: 20,000 London bobbies walk off the job in Britain's first police strike. September * September 28: Bulgaria collapses and Hindenburg and Ludendorff conclude that the strategic situation has shifted against the exhausted Central Powers and in favor of the Alliance. October * October: Smith-Turner Bill introduced into Congres to create a national Department of Education thatw ould distribute federal monies only to states that require public and private education in English only. * Evening October 3-4: Newly appointed German Chancellor Prince Max sends U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson a letter proposing an immediate armistice with the Fourteen Points as the basis for peace. * October 17: German War Cabinet meets and Ludendorff insists on continuing the First World War. * October 25: Chancellor Prince Max asks Kaiser Wilhem II to dismiss Ludendorff. * October 28: Kaiser Wilhem II accept's Ludendorff resignation. * October 30: Ottoman Imperial Army is disbanded under the terms of the Ottoman-Allied Murdos Armistice. November * November 7: German armistice delegation made contact with an advance guard of the French First Army; Foch meets them and dictates Allied terms. * November 11: WWl Armistice signed, the guns fall silent. Centrist Greman politician Matthias Erzberger heads the delegation that signs the agrrement in trhe railcar in the forest of Compiegne northeast of Paris. December * December 22: First issue of Amadeo Bordiga's Leninist journal Il Soviet appears in Naples. * December 25: Joseph Goebbels loses his religion and finds another. Spending Christmas Eve in his student flat in Wurzburg with Anka Stalherm, future Nazi Minister of Propaganda Goebbels misses midnight mass for the first time in his life and never again goes to church or has his confession heard. He resigns from the Catholic Unitas Association. * December 28: Muhammad Sambo and Muhammad Ohag Musa lead Mahdist army in attacking Kassala Fort in Sudan. 12 rebels die. Category: Year